Huxley be damned: I love cyberspace!

hey say that 1,000 new people hook up to the Internet for the first time every single
day. A couple of months ago, I became one of them.

I resisted as long as I could. Really I did. With my sense of direction, I figured that once
I hit the information superhighway, I’d never find an offramp.

Now that I’m there, I don’t want to find one.

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley be damned. If this is the brave new world, then give
me more of it!

Seriously, once you make that singularly personal decision to usher in the 21st Century with
open arms, there is no turning back. The feeling of power at your fingertips is
intoxicating.

And once you arrive, you quickly see what our educators mean when they say the
antiquated textbooks of yesteryear are no longer enough. Not only should all schools have
computers  they should be replacing those computers every couple of years and devising
curricula that take full advantage of the vast resources of cyberspace.

Basic skills will always be important, but there is no way the basic skills of yesterday are the
basic skills of tomorrow. I envy the children who are just entering grade school, for they
will go places that I can only dream about.

Anyway. Back to today. Hopefully the cyber-experts out there will excuse my ignorance
and any misused jargon in this commentary. I’m so new at this, I’m still learning ten new
basic skills a day.

I found the World Wide Web extremely user-friendly. It didn’t take more than a few hours
for me to run into enough information and learn enough hypertext markup language to
create simplistic (but fast-loading!) Web pages for Old Town Newhall, Friends of Mentryville, my Signal columns and a few other things.

There is no dearth of Santa Clarita Valley Websites, with more under construction all the
time. Just type the words "Santa Clarita" into one of many search engines, and
you’ll find a variety of things.

[later known as VPOP], the Santa Clarita
Valley’s first and biggest local Internet service provider (294-8163 or www.vpop.net), the
local Democrats (www.daa.org) and Republicans (www.calgop.org) both have homes on the
Web.

And everyone’s Website is "linked" to other Websites of similar interest. When I
talk about the SCV Historical Society in an uploaded column, for instance, you just click on
the words "Historical Society" with
your mouse and go directly to the society’s Website.

The historical society in cyberspace. What a concept.

It’s easy to understand why the long-distance telephone companies are freaking out about
the Internet. Everyone in the world is as close as everyone else.

You use a local phone line to hook up to your local Internet server and send your e-mail
through the mystical ether to someone who is hooked up at his end through a local phone
line. No long-distance charges.

I recently had an interesting e-mail conversation with one of the stars of Germany’s hottest new rock band  me
in German, he in English. All for the price of a local call. Nowadays, going to Germany is
as easy as going to Hart Park.

Another thing. The aspiration to police the Internet must be coming from politicians who
know even less about the Web than I do. You don’t run into pornography by accident. It
doesn’t magically pop up on your screen. Most Internet porn is by subscription only, and
you would have to go out of your way to find it.

Besides, all Internet service providers require passwords for logging in. If you’re so afraid
the kids will search for "bondage," say, when you aren’t around, don’t give them
the password! Log in for them, and let them surf the Net only while you’re home.

Other, more practical mechanisms for locking the kids out of certain sections of the Internet
are also available. Ask your software distributor or Internet service provider about them.

A recent Rand Corporation study found that the time has come for every American to have
an e-mail address, just like you have a telephone, television and VCR. Ever since the
Orwellian year of 1984, more information has been stored electronically than in all the
libraries on earth.

It is a brave new world, indeed. And it’s a blast.

* * *

Please mail in your entry forms for the combined Frontier Days-Fourth of July Parade! For
parade information, point your browser to www.scvparade.com.